Expert Interview: Abhishek Daga, Co-Founder of Thrillophilia
Thrillophilia, India-based tours and activities marketplace, has come a long way in terms of its product that solves pretty much every usecase of Indian tours and activities suppliers.
Abhishek Daga, Thrillophilia’s co-founder, talks to Product Locus about the company’s product strategy, the features the company has killed, what all qualities Daga looks for while hiring a product manager, and many more interesting insight.
1. Tours and activities segment is one of the most under penetrated and unorganised in travel industry. What are some of the product level challenges you faced?
Marketplace platforms have typically a chicken and egg problem; in tours and activities market the problem is little bigger on the supplier side, as the sector is completely unorganized.
To create real value in this space, the tours and activities need to be bookable in real time, power suppliers to fill vacant seats and enable travellers to find local travel experiences and book them on-the-go. All of these looks easy from outside, but the real challenge is on supply side.
Let’s talk first of bigger attractions (govt bodies) or large suppliers. Most of them do not have inventory available online in real time, so getting their systems online is challenging. The other problem is with small suppliers who are in huge volumes — educating them and motivating them to keep on updating inventory even when they are not getting enough bookings is a real uphill task.
We build both web and mobile apps for suppliers but quite a few of the suppliers would still miss to update inventory, so we started classifying suppliers on the updates they do in system and the bookings they falter. With this information, we have built smart alerts for the suppliers. To further engage and interact with our system, we started sending some simple format business analytics to them.
We also defined the workflow automation, like an instant book icon will be removed for the supplier, the rating and ranking in search will dip in case of faltering a booking. Similarly, we made the review algorithm very powerful and business impacting.
2. A product person learning a lot about marketing is more useful, or learning a lot about UI/UX is more useful?
Marketing is art of persuading, seducing and attempting to finally attract them to buying products and services. This cannot be successful without great visual appearance and UX.
Marketing creates value for a company and great UI / UX creates value for the user.
Marketing helps you to reach out to more users, and UI / UX are face of the company which plays it’s part when the user starts interacting and performs his very first step in goal funnel.
The ability to serve users and finally convert them into customers requires deep understanding of their needs and goals at the point of engagement, and that insight is gained through research and constant improvement in UI / UX.
I’m a firm believer that the first impression of the brand is design. However, in the love triangle both marketing and design needs to be backed by data.
3. What are some of the features that you killed in Thrillophilia due to its less impact?
Deals!
While deals work for the world of travel we realized activities and travel experiences are something which are booked at last moment.
At Thrillophilia, our 40% of bookings are on the day of trip or a day before. Deals do not excite at that moment, access of right information at right time and faster checkout are the key.
We moved away from discounting and we’ve never looked back.
4. Would you be launching Artificial Intelligence in Thrillophilia soon?
The messaging is already live on Thrillophilia, we launched it last week.
It’s a pretty smart messaging system which solves lot of use cases like when to connect the operator, when to generate alerts and when to route via SMS in case of internet disconnect. We are solving a lot of use cases pertaining to Asian market.
We see AI solving multiple use cases in messaging itself where we can predict user behaviour depending on destinations and categories browsed, price point of tours viewed and time spent on them.
So, when a user asks a question as simple as “send me list of best things to do in Bali”, considering his previous touch points in the system (from browsing history) to his past interactions, we can give him a very personalised list of travel experiences.
5. If you are the CEO of Apple, what all new products you would ask your team to build and why?
I would put majority of my resources in solving one problem — devices not dependent on daily charging but can absorb energy from wireless systems, heat, wind, solar, hydrogen cells and whatever available — but free the user from the pain of charging them everyday.
6. What are the top 3 growth hacks that worked for Thrillophilia?
- Experiment a lot, be crazy!
- Learn from data
- Rinse and Repeat
7. Flipkart or Amazon? and why?
It’s personal choice. In the past two years, I’ve never been on any other e-com websites except Amazon.
I think it’s a lot to do with their checkouts and they know me when to replenish my stock of certain things.
Amazon solves my problem so I stick to it. That’s the only app I have in E-com on my phone.
8. What are the top three products you admire, and why?
I would pick four.
- Booking.com — for travel transactions
- Airbnb — for vacation rental
- Tripadvisor — for travel content and reviews
- Zomato — for food content and reviews
All of them have very focused approach towards solving one problem and they all have pioneered in their space be it technology, UI/UX or building communities.
9. If there is one rule that the Indian government can launch that will boom startup ecosystem, what should that be?
Accelerators and working spaces powered by govt, where every operational issues are taken care of and startups can focus on real business and product building.
Though government has few schemes here and there I do not think it’s implemented as full fledged solutions and most startups are not aware of them.
10. What all qualities you look for while hiring a product management professional?
We do not have product managers at Thrillophilia, being a startup we need to be agile, our UX designer, data analyst and developer together wear the hat of a product manager.
If I have to hire a product manager, I would look for someone who is good in this order Data → UX → Technology. Someone who would be comfortable with tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Localytics, Looker, Flurry, Amplitude, Optimizely, Excel, VBA, and interactive tools like Photoshop.
I would look for two more qualities in Products manager.
First one is passion towards the product, when I say passion I mean not only they should be passionate about the product building but should also be able to create an atmosphere of inspiring passion, where they can build a shared vision, that people can adopt on their own, which keeps everyone motivated.
The second quality of product manager should be empathy, towards teams and users. Most product managers lack this skill and are arrogant. If you do not hear out your different teams and your users, you are shooting in air.
Have questions for Abhishek Daga? Ask in comments section below.
